Fields without honour: contemporary war as globalenforcement

The chapter discusses the role of war in contemporary social theory. Following the mainstream tradition of classical Western thought, armed conflicts do not find a legitimate place in the sociological theory, because, given the scientific division of labor in social sciences, they traditionally belong to political science and history. According to the author, this lack of sociological interest prevents a real understanding of the new social features of war, especially after the end of the Cold war. Today, even if Western countries are involved in armed conflicts in foreign countries - like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.-, they tend to conceive bombing, covert operations on the terrain and so on not as wars but rather as a sort of police enforcement in other countries - a global police. On one side this allows a “professionalization” of military activities (as the employment of contractors, special forces, robots, drones); but on the other it implies a “normalization” of war. Reversing the meaning of Carl von Clausewitz's famous statement, war doesn’t appear as a continuation of politics by other means (i.e. the result of a political decision), but in a way it is the form of Western politics in the rest of the world. This promotes not only a global turbulence, but also an anthropological change. Since USA and Europe inhabitants are protected from the effects of war, they do not feel at war: the consequence is a blunting of the perception of other people’s suffering.