The problem of managing or limiting violence ranks as one of the most difficult and demanding in human affairs, but left and liberal political theory have only rarely touched on it. A great deal has been written about the origins of war and the possibility of peace. Yet for the most part this literature has remained unconnected with theories of the internal constitution of societies and governments - it has been preoccupied with the behaviour of nation-states in the international arena.

Left political thought has often taken up the question of revolutionary violence, and has discussed this in tandem with the repressive violence of the state. Leftists, however, have mostly assumed that violence would not be a problem in a socialist society and hence have given little thought to how social relations might become free from it. Most varieties of liberal thinking are not in the end too different; for liberal political thought has been built around the idea of the contract, and a contract is essentially a pacific negotiation of exchange.

Conservatives of various persuasions have given more attention to the role of violence, particularly of war, in social life. Some versions of conservative thought, indeed, have glorified war and martial values. What conservative philosophers by and large have not done, however, is to consider how war and violence might be transcended. For conservatives have tended to assume that these are generic to the human condition.

There are of course numerous contexts in which violence figures in human social life, almost always in relation to structures of power. Violence, as Clausewitz says, is normally at the other end of persuasion; it is one among other means whereby individuals, groups or states seek to impose their will on others. I shall not try to discuss the origins or nature of violence in general, nor shall I consider the issue of violence and crime as such. I shall limit myself to the following issues (large though each of them still is). From the point of view of utopian realism, is it feasible to suppose that the role of warfare might diminish and how might such a process be furthered? What can be done to limit the spread of sexual violence? How can we counter violence which develops on the basis of ethnic or cultural differences? These may seem like disconnected issues, but in the light of the social transformations discussed earlier in the book some clear connections, as I shall try to show, exist between them.

I take it that each of these questions raises problems of pacification and I take pacification to be as important a part of an agenda of radical politics as any of the issues I have discussed earlier. For even if the Cold War has been relegated to the past, the threat of nuclear conflict and other sorts of military violence will remain for the indefinite future; and violence and the threat of violence in social life can destroy or cripple the lives of millions.

Several provisos are in order here. There are respects, and some very important respects, in which the use of violence is necessary to achieve widely desired social ends. Thus pacification itself presumes a control of the means of violence on the part of legitimate authorities. I think one can take it for granted, though, that all forms of violence are to be minimized as far as possible, whether legitimate or illegitimate. In other words, the tendency of governing authorities to secure a monopoly over the means of violence should not be equated with an increasing resort to violence.

'Violence' has sometimes been defined in a very broad way. Johan Galtung, for example, argues for an 'extended concept of violence' which would refer to a wide set of conditions that inhibit the development of individuals' life chances. Violence is any barrier which impedes the realization of potential, where such a barrier is social rather than natural: 'if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed...'¹ As with Pierre Bourdieu's idea of 'symbolic violence', the point is to apply the concept of violence to a wide variety of forms of oppression which people might suffer, and thereby to relate it to general criteria of social justice. The problem with such notions is that they make an already very widespread phenomenon ever-present. What is specific to violence as ordinarily understood - the use of force to cause physical harm to another - becomes lost from view. I shall therefore understand violence in this straight-forward and conventional sense.

The state and pacification

The issue of pacification has to be understood in relation to the long-term development of modern institutions and the modern state. Violence and the state, as rightist thinkers have always tended to emphasize, are closely connected; the state is the prime vehicle of war. In respect of their deployment of violence, however, premodern states differed in a basic way from nation-states. In the premodern state, the political centre was never able to sustain a full monopoly over the means of violence. Brigandage, banditry, piracy and blood-feuds were always common, and in most states local warlords retained a good deal of independent military power. Moreover, the power of the political centre depended in a fairly immediate way on the threat of violence. Premodern states were segmental in character: the centre normally had no way of enforcing obedience from subjects in more peripheral areas save by a show of force. In spite of the despotic and bloodthirsty character which many premodern political regimes displayed, their level of substantive power in day-to-day social relations was relatively low.

As a result of a number of factors, including particularly improved communications and an intensifying of surveillance mechanisms, nation-states became 'sovereign powers': the agency of government was able to achieve much greater administrative control over its subject populations than ever before. To cut a long story very short, and to use a good deal of oversimplification, the result was a pervasive process of internal pacification, achieved in most 'classical nation-states' - those developing from the eighteenth century onwards in Europe and the United States².

Pacification doesn't mean, of course, the disappearance of violence from the interior of states; and it is quite consistent with the waging of wars in the international arena. It refers, in this context at any rate, to the more or less successful monopoly of the means of violence on the part of the political authorities within the state. Internal pacification went along with the formation of professionalized armed services, 'pointing outwards' towards other states in the state system, rather than being preoccupied with the maintenance of internal social order. The convergent development of capitalism and parliamentary democracy, together with systems of centralized law, played a major role in 'extruding' violence from the immediate mechanisms of government.

Although processes of internal pacification have proved much harder to achieve in 'state-nations' and ex-colonial societies than in the classical nation-state, they have almost everywhere proceeded far compared with the premodern state. Civil war is by now a specifically abnormal situation in most states throughout the world, particularly in the economically advanced regions. In earlier forms of state, by contrast, it was almost the norm; contestation of the power of the ruling authorities by rival military groups was frequent and often protracted.

The era of the internal pacification of states was also the time of the industrialization of war: war changed its character as weaponry became mechanized and mass-produced. The industrialization of war destroyed militarism in one guise, although it sustained it in another. The 'warrior values' long promoted by aristocratic strata went into prolonged decline. War could no longer be seen as an occasion for display and ritual. The highly coloured clothing that had so often been favoured by warrior groups and traditional armies gave way to sober uniforms of camouflage. In the shape of admiration for valour, esprit de corps and military discipline, militarism survived in an altered form. Indeed, if 'militarism' be defined as the widespread support for military principles and ideas in the larger society - and the preparedness of civilian populations to support war en masse if need be - militarism became more rather than less common.

It can be argued, however, that with the further development of industrialization of war, and above all with the invention of nuclear weaponry, these processes started to go dramatically into reverse. During the Cold War, the existence of large-scale nuclear arsenals formed part of the (remote) experience of everyone - the most threatening of all high-consequence risks. Yet at the same time, Clausewitz's theorem became turned around. Although smaller wars were fought out 'by proxy' in many places, a nuclear confrontation was 'unthinkable' because of its devastating consequences. War could no longer be turned to when diplomacy failed; diplomacy had to have as its goal the avoidance of large-scale war altogether. From this point onwards, one could say, militarism started to go into decline.

The emergence of what Martin Shaw calls a 'post-military society' would certainly be of interest to any programme of radical politics in the present day³. A post-military society responds to the changing global situation following the Cold War, but also builds on longer-term trends within the developed societies. Militarism, Shaw argues, has been diminishing in many countries across the world since the end of the Second World War. It was a consequence of a state system which mixed internal pacification with external preparation for war. Its institutional backdrop was the sovereign state, the nation-in-arms and mass (male) conscription. Militarism, in the terminology used in this book, was a characteristic of simple modernization. Current social, economic and political transformations undermine it.

Militarism in this sense was characterized by large-scale, hierarchical systems of command which paralleled the industrial and state bureaucracies. There was in fact a direct connection, often remarked on, between militarism and the early development of both democracy and the welfare state; citizenship rights were forged in the context of mass mobilization for war. Militarism has declined as a result of several trends: the shifting, and in some ways diminishing, autonomy of classical nation-states; the disappearance of clear-cut external enemies; the reduced influence of classical nationalism and the rise of substate nationalisms; and the functional obsolescence of large-scale war.

Can we see these processes, in so far as they are sustained or accelerate, as leading to a reduction of the role of military violence in settling disputes? Is there now an extension of internal pacification into external areas?

We might give a cautious assent to both of these questions. A post-military society is not one where the threat of large-scale military violence is removed, especially given the massive economic differences within the global system. Geopolitical rivalries are likely to remain strong, and destructive war remains a possibility in many parts of the world. A post-military order is none the less likely to be more resistant to mass mobilization for military purposes than used to be the case. Smaller, more 'civilized' armed forces may still wield large destructive power. Yet it seems likely that the military will become functionally more separate from other groups than before. The expectation that has affected the lives of young men for generations - their possible, even probable, involvement in war - could end.

I don't want to pursue here the difficult question of how the world might police itself if the post-military society, in combination with other trends, helps reduce tendencies to large-scale war. Pacification on a global scale is unlikely to reproduce the processes involved in the internal pacification of states. I shall consider only the implications for features of cosmopolitanism discussed earlier. Consolidating a post-military society would mean generalizing the attitude that violence should play less and less part in settling international tensions and problems. The active side of citizenship responsibilities would imply recognition of an obligation to nourish pacific rather than warlike values, this to be as basic a part of a democratized polity as any other.

Peace movements played an important role in producing the shifts in social consciousness - West and East - which contributed to the ending of the Cold War. Like ecological movements, peace movements were driven in the first instance above all by awareness of high-consequence risk: consequently, they were largely single-issue movements. They were oriented to the Cold War, and with its collapse have either disappeared or changed their form. The mass mobilizations such movements were periodically able to generate have more or less ceased, and don't look likely to be revived in the near future. How does one mobilize for peace in a society with no enemies - but many real military dangers? Peace movements have become peace organizations and they still have plenty of concrete tasks. They can seek to raise the consciousness of citizenries and governments concerning the dangers of nuclear proliferation and they can keep alive the debate over nuclear power, especially its connection with the political production of weaponry.

The single most important factor here, however, is the altered relation between peace movements and the interests of governments in an emergent post-military order. States without enemies, and marked by a concomitant decline in militarism, are in quite a different situation from either the Cold War or pre-existing systems of military alliance and national antagonism. Although border disputes may remain, and invasions sometimes occur, most states no longer have any incentive to wage offensive war. 'Peace' takes on quite different connotations in such circumstances than it did when it meant absence of war in a nation-state system permanently geared up for it. Hence the interests of governments and peace organizations are much more convergent than they used to be; and there is no reason why they shouldn't often work in tandem rather than in opposition.

Masculinity and war

So far as civic values and responsibilities are concerned, what should we make of the fact that the propagation of military violence has always been a resolutely male affair? Feminist authors have quite often drawn direct connections between masculinity and war: warfare is a concrete expression of male aggressiveness. The civic virtues that would promote peace rather than war, it is said, are those characteristically associated with the activities and values of women. Expressed in such a way, however, this thesis is somewhat implausible. War is not an expansion of a generalized aggressiveness, but associated with the rise of the state. Although there might be some men who actively relish war, the large majority do not⁴.

One couldn't deny, of course, that there is a relation between war, military power and masculinity. Men may have to be indoctrinated in order to wage war, but war and the military have formed part of the ethos of masculinity - or masculinities - in a deeprooted way. This was true most especially of warrior aristocracies: war-making was glorified as the highest of all values. With the decline of the warrior ethic, military violence was no longer widely seen as the chief testing ground for heroism, honour and adventure - although some strands of Old Conservative thought long continued to regard this situation as reversible. Valour remained a dominant value in military circles, particularly in officer corps, but the professionalizing of the armed forces separated military ideals from the concrete experience of the rest of the male population. To 'serve' in the military became instead part of a shifting male ethos of instrumentality and protection. Masculinity came to be associated with a commitment to work and with 'providing' for dependants; assuming the role of soldier when called on to do so was part of the intrinsic maleness of the public domain.

In the post-military society there is a push and pull between the decay of ideals of masculinity in these various senses and the entry of women into the public arena. Women have gone into the armed forces in increasing numbers. They have mostly accepted existing military norms and have agitated for complete inclusion: that is, they expect to achieve full combat rights alongside men. In the meantime, the masculine values which went along with militarism are corroding or becoming ambiguous as a result of the advance of gender equality and the growth of social reflexivity. It is in this context that we should examine the idea of a war against women, most boldly developed by Marilyn French. French interprets such a war as a long-term phenomenon, dating back even to the first origins of civilization. Up to some six thousand years ago, she says, humans lived in small, cooperative groups in which the status and power of women was either equivalent, or superior, to that of men. With the formation of the first states, women became enslaved and subject to male domination - a situation which the advent of modernity only served to worsen:

In personal and public life, in kitchen, bedroom and halls of parliament, men wage unremitting war against women... Men start repressing females at birth: only the means vary by society. They direct female babies to be selectively aborted, little girls to be neglected, underfed, genitally mutilated, raped, or molested... The climate of violence against women harms all women. To be female is to walk the world in fear... Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor - age, dress or colour - distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not⁵.

As French describes it, the war against women is widespread indeed. It embraces all systems of patriarchal discrimination against women and is an expression of them. Male violence, 'the physical war against women', follows on from broader structures of inequality. The battering of women, rape and sexual murder form a material expression of the larger system of domination. Even much male on male violence, she suggests, is a sublimated form of violence that would otherwise have women as its object. 'When women are not available, men turn other males into "women". So male prisoners regularly rape other male prisoners and many ministers and priests betray the trust of little boys or male teenagers by molesting them'⁶.

I think one can in fact agree that there is a war of men, or some men, against women today, but not in the manner in which French represents it. A war is an exceptional rather than a permanent state of affairs, and it doesn't make much sense, except in a metaphorical way, to speak of such a thing as enduring for thousands of years. Moreover, such an analysis misses what is new about the situation of the present day. Patriarchy has indeed existed for millennia; however, the circumstances in which it has become contested, and has to some extent broken down, are of much more recent provenance. Over most of the course of human history, patriarchy was accepted by both sexes; collective women's protests against the male rule may have been staged sometimes, but the historical record is not littered with them in the way in which it is with other forms of rebellions, such as peasant rebellions.

As with other systems of power, patriarchy has never been sustained mainly through the use of violence. The power of men over women has endured because it has been legitimated on the basis of differentiated gender roles, values associated with these, and a sexual separation between private and public spheres. In terms of legitimacy, particularly important has been the schismatic view of women which contrasts 'virtue' with the corrupt or fallen woman. The fallen woman in premodern systems of patriarchy referred not only to a category of persons - prostitutes, mistresses, courtesans - who stood outside the pale of normal family life. To become 'fallen' was a disgrace that could happen to anyone if she did not abide by codes of virtue and proper behaviour.

Patriarchy in premodern cultures was maintained by women as well as by men: women wielded their own sanctions against those who transgressed. So far as control of the means of violence was concerned, however, this lay in the hands of men. As a means of last resort, violence was as significant a sanctioning mechanism of power in patriarchy as elsewhere. Kate Millett has summed up all this very well: 'We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its systems of socialisation, so complete the general assent to its values, so long and so universally has it prevailed in human society, that it scarcely seems to require violent implementation.' Yet, she goes on to add, it still had 'the rule of force to rely on... in emergencies and as an ever-present instrument of intimidation'⁷.

At this point, however, a major qualification needs to be added to Millett's view. The violence by means of which men policed patriarchy was not mainly directed at women. In many societies, including those of premodern Europe, women have been chattels of men and have no doubt often been treated with the casual violence that the status of a mere possession might provoke. But respect, even love, can be much more powerful forms of domination than the sheer use of force. Probably more often than not, men have treated ('virtuous') women with moral approval and esteem. The violence by means of which patriarchy was sustained was mainly from men towards other men. This was particularly true in respect of organized or semi-organized violence.

Hostile images of women, and physical maltreatment - such as the punishments meted out to witches - were important sanctioning mechanisms against female misbehaviour. Male on male violence, however, integrated the defence of patriarchy with the upholding of other forms of order. In many premodern societies a man's honour was directly dependent on the honour of his family, which he had a duty to uphold no matter where the threat was coming from. The reputation of a family could be tainted in various ways, but certainly this always included the virtue of its female members. Feuds conducted between kin groups commonly sprung from the defence of honour, or from an attempt to compromise it; but even where women were directly involved it was usually other men who were the targets of hostile response⁸.

What has happened today is that this system of violence has collapsed, or is collapsing, on a worldwide basis. Processes of internal pacification in most developed countries long ago displaced the feud, but remnants of the moral foundations of patriarchy were reshaped in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Briefly put, the legitimation of patriarchy came to depend on a reiteration of the schism between the virtuous woman and the harlot - the second of these subjected to the sanctions of the state, the first bolstered by specific legal and moral structurings of the 'normal family'. Male sexuality was retraditionalized and was something that could be 'taken for granted', while female sexuality was in large part controlled through being subjected to an interrogatory gaze: it became understood as the 'dark continent', problematized by the first stirrings of the assertion of independent women's rights.

The large-scale entry of women into the labour force, together with universal democratization and the continued transformation of family forms, has radically altered the 'tradition in modernity' compromise which characterized simple modernization. Patriarchy can no longer be defended by violence directed by some men against others. Men (or, as one must say, some men) turn directly to violence against women as a means of shoring up disintegrating systems of patriarchal power - and it is in this sense that one might speak of a war against women today. It is not an expression of traditional patriarchal systems but, instead, a reaction to their partial dissolution.

Much of such violence, then, results from a system which is decaying; it results from the fact that women's challenge to patriarchy has in some part been successful. Its successes have provoked violent reactions; but they have also brought a great deal into the open that was previously hidden, and enforced an interrogation of much that was carried in tradition⁹.

From the point of view of utopian realism, overcoming male violence against women is contingent on the structural changes now affecting work, the family and the state, and the possibilities these yield - combined with an expansion of dialogic democracy. Masculinity and feminity are today identities and complexes of behaviour in the process of reconstruction. Increasing gender equality is paradoxical for the overall social community unless it goes along with structural changes which promote democratization and new forms of social solidarity - and unless there is a mutual emotional realignment of the sexes. Men's movements that have developed thus far are of various types, some seeking to reassert patriarchal forms of masculinity. In so far, however, as such movements contemplate and act on the detraditionalizing of masculinity in its diverse forms, they can be an important influence in promoting an emotional realignment. Although their influence thus far is tiny compared with that of the feminist movement, it makes sense to see them as the functional equivalents of peace movements - trying to help put an end to the undeclared war of men against women.

The transformation of masculinity and femininity, or rather their multiple forms, as inherited from the past, will depend in a basic way on how far a post-military society comes into being, and what consequences flow from the changing character of work, the family and sexual relationships. Male identity has undoubtedly been bound up with the centrality of work - as fulltime permanent employment - in modern societies. Or rather, it has been bound up with the intersections between work, the family and sexuality. For commitment to fulltime work in the paid labour force was not just an economic phenomenon - it was an emotional one. The engagements of men in the public sphere enforced a schism in men's lives of a different nature from that characteristic of women's experience. Men, or many men, across different class categories, became cut off from the emotional sources of their own lives - the origins of the by now celebrated phenomenon of 'male emotional inexpressiveness'. They left women for the most part to manage these areas in their role as 'specialists in love'.

The fact that the higher echelons in most occupational domains are still dominated by men, while men continue to play a much smaller part in childcare than women, is quite often regarded as cause for despair. Yet is it surprising that things have not yet changed to the degree that most feminist thinkers would hope? For those same thinkers have demonstrated that patriarchy has been deeply entrenched for thousands of years; it would be surprising if they could be overcome over a number of decades.

Women have won a variety of legal rights they did not hold before, and are more strongly represented in most occupational domains than they used to be, including the higher levels. Rates of unemployment of men have risen more than those of women, and the 'feminizing' of some male careers is placing in question the old models of work associated with productivism. Equal parenting - with the socioeconomic arrangements which might permit it - may still be utopian, but now carries more than a dash of reality¹⁰.

Male violence against women could be lessened if these developments progress and at the same time new forms of sexual identity were pioneered. As Lynne Segal has observed,

The conscious subversion of men's power... is partly the work of those who travel the slow and grinding route taken by mainstream reformist political parties and organisations committed to sexual equality. It is also the work of those engaged in the more erratic, more radical, spurts and retreats along the volatile route of interpersonal sexual politics, as feminists, lesbians, gay and anti-sexist men refashion and live out their new versions of what it is to be 'woman' or 'man'. It is finally, as feminists have always preached and often practised, also a matter of cultural subversion - the creative work of remoulding the lives and experiences of women and de-centring the androcentric positioning of men in all existing discourses. Though it might be difficult to perceive, these routes do intersect. Interpersonal struggles to change men, attempts by men themselves to refashion their conceptions of what it is to be a man, always encounter and frequently collide with other power relations... It is not so hard to imagine a world free from the fear of too little work for men, and all too much work for women... It is just as easy to envisage a world free from fears of the interpersonal violence, rape, and child sexual abuse which, in their most dangerous and prevalent forms, are the violent acts of men...¹¹

Easy to envisage, a critic might say, hard actually to bring about: how might the combating of male violence against women relate to other forms of pacification? There is a clear connection, as has been mentioned, with the decline of militarism. Male violence is certainly not all of a piece with the waging of wars, but there are common elements that spill over from one to the other. Mass rapes are quite often perpetrated in times of war; conversely, attitudes of adventurism found among some who enlist in the armed forces seem empirically linked to a tendency to violent behaviour towards women¹².

More important, probably, are potential connections the other way around. The creation of a democracy of the emotions, as I have sought to show earlier, has implications for social solidarity and citizenship. Men's violence against women, or a great deal of it, can be understood as a generalized refusal of dialogue. Couldn't one see this as a Clausewitzean theory of interpersonal relations? Where dialogue stops, violence begins. Yet such violence is (in principle) as archaic in the personal domain as Clausewitz's theorem is in the wider public arena.

Violence, ethnic and cultural difference

As I write these lines, a tenuous dialogue has been established between warring parties in Israel and in Bosnia; the armed conflicts in Somalia, Angola, Afghanistan and elsewhere look set to continue. To move from violence against women back towards such military confrontations might appear as heterodox as the link developed with overall processes of pacification. Yet the connections are there. The war in Bosnia, for example, witnessed the systematic rape of Muslim women as a deliberate way of humiliating them - and as statements from those involved made clear, of humiliating their menfolk also.

Confrontations such as those in the former Yugoslavia and other regions might perhaps be a residue of the past - a clearing-up of lines of division and hostility. Alternatively, and more disturbingly, they may be the shape of things to come. For the very changes that act to reduce the possibility of wars between states might increase the chances of regional military confrontations - the more so since fundamentalisms of various kinds can act to sharpen pre-existing ethnic or cultural differences.

Under what conditions are the members of different ethnic groups or cultural communities able to live alongside one another and in what circumstances are the relations between them likely to collapse into violence? The question is again a large one, and I shall discuss only a few aspects of it. There are virtually no societies in the world where different ethnic groups are wholly equal to one another. Ethnic division, and some other kinds of differences, such as religious ones, are normally also differences of stratification. The inequalities associated with ethnicity are often sources of tension or mutual hostility, and thus play their part in stimulating conflicts which may lead to a collapse of civil order.

Yet such inequalities are too commonplace to provide sufficient explanations of outbreaks of major violence. Without seeking to analyse how common or otherwise such conflicts are likely to be, or what their main origins are, I want to discuss three sets of circumstances relevant to how they might be inhibited or contained. The first is the potential influence of dialogic democracy; the second, the countering of fundamentalism; the third, controlling what I shall call degenerate spirals of emotional communication. All relate to, or draw on, ideas discussed in other parts of this volume.

There are only a limited number of ways, analytically speaking, in which different cultures or ethnicities can coexist. One is through segmentation - through geographical separation or cultural closure. Few groups or nations, however, can sustain a clear-cut separation from others today. Small communities which try to cut themselves off from the outside world, or limit contact with it, nearly all become reabsorbed to a greater or lesser degree - as has happened, for example, with the vast majority of the communes of the 1960s. States which seek isolation, such as in a sense the whole Soviet bloc did, or China or Iran, have not been able to preserve it in the longer term.

As a 'solution' to problems of living along with clashes of values, then, segmentation is much less significant than it used to be, with the emergence of a global cosmopolitan order. Although complete withdrawal from the wider social universe has become problematic, various kinds of group separation and national differentiation can of course be maintained. Groups can keep to themselves and physical segregation has not lost all its meaning. In cities, for example, different ethnic groups often occupy distinct neighbourhoods which have only limited contacts with one another. Geophysical separation is one means by which the stratification of ethnic groups and underclasses is organized. Those in the poorer areas may lack the capacity to travel, while the members of more affluent groups rarely if ever visit the deprived neighbourhoods.

Given the diasporic character of many ethnic and cultural differentiations, however, and the penetrative influence of mass media, segmental cultures now only function with some degree of harmony in a cosmopolitan climate. Where segmentation has become broken down, and exit difficult, only two options remain: communication, or coercion and violence.

There is a tension between communication and violence, then, of a more acute kind than existed in earlier phases of modern social development - and this is true not only in the industrialized societies but on a global scale. In such a situation, whether combined with more orthodox democratic institutions or not, dialogic democracy becomes a prime means for the containment or dissolution of violence. It isn't far-fetched to see a direct line of connection here between male violence against women in everyday life and violence between subnational groups.

Difference - whether difference between the sexes, difference in behaviour or personality, cultural or ethnic difference - can become a medium of hostility; but it can also be a medium of creating mutual understanding and sympathy. This is Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons', which can be expressed as a virtuous circle. Understanding the point of view of the other allows for greater self-understanding, which in turn enhances communication with the other. In the case of male violence against women it is well established that dialogue can dispel the 'Clausewitzean theorem'. That is to say, violent individuals become less so - in other spheres of their lives also - if they manage to develop a virtuous circle of communication with a significant other or others.

Dialogue has great substitutive power in respect of violence, even if the relation between the two in empirical contexts is plainly complex. Talk can in many circumstances lead to hostility, and to the possibility of violence, rather than serving to undermine them. In a diversity of situations, a refusal to engage with the other is tied to systems of coercive power, as is its opposite, the absence of voice. The advance of dialogic democracy almost always depends on correlate processes of socioeconomic transformation. These things having been said, dialogic democratization is likely to be central to civil cosmopolitanism in a world of routine cultural diversity. Difference can be a means of a fusion of horizons; what is a potentially virtuous circle, however, can in some circumstances become degenerate. I would define a degenerate spiral of communication as one where antipathy feeds on antipathy, hate upon hate.

And this observation brings us full circle. For how else could one explain the events in Bosnia, and parallel happenings elsewhere? Fundamentalisms, as I have said earlier, are edged with potential violence. Wherever fundamentalism takes hold, whether it be religious, ethnic, nationalist or gender fundamentalism, degenerate spirals of communication threaten. What is originally merely an isolationism, or perhaps only an insistence on the purity of a local tradition, can, if circumstances so conspire, turn into a vicious circle of animosity and venom. Bosnia sits on a historic fault-line dividing Christian Europe from Islamic civilization. Yet one cannot produce a sufficient explanation of the Yugoslavian conflict only by reference to old hostilities. Those hostilities, when refocused in the present, provide a context; once conflict begins, and hate starts to feed on hate, those who were good neighbours can end as the bitterest of enemies.

[ Anthony Giddens, "Political Theory and the Problem of Violence", Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge 1994, pp. 229-245 ]

Webmaster: Slobodan Markovic (twiddle@eunet.yu)

All rights reserved. Belgrade Circle Journal encourages the reproduction of material appearing on its pages, provided that the source and the author are cited, except in cases where this would constitute violation of copyright held by other organisations or individuals.