Introductory note -- Concerning Conflict, War and Peace
Presented at the international conference marking 25 years of Conflict Studies at Utrecht University, 13-14 February 2025
In this welcoming note I’d like to do three things, by means of a sneak preview to all the conversations ahead of us. First, I’ll say something about what defines Conflict Studies as a field - a school, an approach- here at Utrecht University. Second, I’ll try and situate the field, and look back on how we positioned ourselves. Third, I’ll say something about new pathways, and about the challenges we face.
Openly performed brutality
But before I go into this, I’d like to say something about our times, and about words.
I am sure the brutality of today’s violence leaves us all stunned and speechless at times: in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, the DRC, but mostly Gaza/Palestine. With all this blunt massacring, bombing, destruction. What is there to say? What difference can we make? What difference do our words, our writings, our teaching make? I hear a lot of people say that’s its never been this bad.
But of course the despair we feel says a lot about our own place in de world. And I am curious to hear what you think. Perhaps I am too bold, or too angry. But I think there is nothing fundamentally new about the logic of violence out there. The intensity, of course, the genocidal scope and velocity, and the visibility is shocking. But this is part of long history of violence and erasure.
What is new is the openly performed support of Western states, including the Netherlands, for the violence. What is new is that now it is clear for every one to see, that the idea of the Western state as upholder of international law and human rights is no more than an illusion, a joke. And it is this false understanding of the Western self that stares us in the face. And that we have to come to terms with. As the Dutch director of Oxfam recently stated: “we are fighting our own government know”.
Yes, Trumps recent idea of turning Gaza into a golf resort, is ludicrous and extremely upsetting. And I understand the reactions: this is beyond reason, dangerous and ugly. And it drives us crazy.
But it is not an aberration. The brutality in which this is openly brough to us, that’s new. Ironically, Trump is a transparent truth-teller about the real motives of US foreign policy. This is accumulation by dispossession right in our faces. Trump sees Gaza not as a problem of war, but as an opportunity for business to build wealth – the classic US economic hegemony of the populist America First doctrine. I am sure we’ll be seeing this applied to Ukraine soon, too. Some already coined it Trump-erialism.
As Western publics, we are not used to this: Western wars were brought to us in more careful wordings: as a strategy of liberation, of securing international peace and human rights. The names of these invasions allude to this: Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom. We were made to believe that “we invade Afghanistan to free Afghan women”. We throw bombs on Libya to rid the country of a dictatorship. So, we could do what Bush junior told us after 9/11: to go back shopping. But the chilling suggestion to take ownership and re-make Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is akin to what The Economist, in 2003, called the “capitalist dream” regime that the US had in mind with Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Straight after the invasion, the Bush administration promulgated four orders that included: the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits, and the elimination of nearly all trade barriers. The labour market, on the other hand, was to be strictly regulated. Strikes were effectively forbidden, and the right to unionize restricted (Harvey 2005: 6).
How to conceptualize this? Neoliberal militarism, peace by exploitation, capitalist peace-making? Any way, it gives a whole new meaning to the notion of ‘brokering peace’, that’s for sure.
So, the world has become more openly ugly. At the same time, the lines of responsibility are also more exposed then ever. Trump does not conceal anything. And also Wilders openly rejects the International Court of Justice and our own Raad van State.
We seem to be at a crossroads. Will this blunt disruptive imperialist brokering become normalized, and acceptable? Or will it set in motion new forms of political awareness, self-reflection, resistance, and care? I think it is going to get worse, for a while. But I put my cards on the second movement of a growing awareness, a collective action turn.
And, again, what role can scholars of conflict, violence and war play, what place do we see for ourselves?
I am sure we’ll discuss these questions the next two days (and the time to come). But first, as promised, back to our anniversary, and my 3 reflections on the past 25 years.
What defines Conflict Studies at UU?
Having grown out of one shared postdoc position has allowed us to maintain a certain coherence. And a certain vocabulary that we all speak and understand, which makes it, I hope, inspiring and possible for newcomers to step into a particular school, a particular approach. If I would have to try and articulate that, I'd say there's at least three points of departure that we take in Utrecht.
First, we take a relational approach to conflict. From the start, we approached conflict as a dynamics of interaction, as an aspect of a relationship. And NOT as an inherent characteristic of the individual, or group, culture, religion, or nation. So taking a strongly anti-essentialist and anti-culturalist position. This allows us to ask questions about escalation and de-escalation, on how people perceive they have incompatible goals, and how and why they act upon this, and through what means.
This may seem obvious to most of you, but in current debates it is often-time the so-called unchangeable, unprovoked evilness of the enemy-other which is seen as the source of war.
Although this type of causality is useful for propagandic purposes, it is not what our empirical evidence demonstrates.
In addition, conflict in our work is understood as a process, not an outcome with clear causes, but as constantly ‘becoming’: as a transforming dynamics of interaction.
We see this in our research, ranging from small and specific encounters between youngsters and police-officers in urban settings, to the complex interactions of military assemblages, and from studying the role of guns and bombs, to algorithms and cyber.
Second, our focus is on the human in war and conflict, and what it means to be human in times of war and violent conflict, studying not merely human rights but human lives.
The tradition at UU has been to “studying up” violent conflict, collective violence and war: through fieldwork in urban neighborhoods in Europe, studying gangs in El Salvador, militias and mercenaries, and civilians in war.
Third, we have been working with interdisciplinary analytical vocabularies. That has been our starting point, really. Conflict Studies was set up to move away from the compartmentalized academic landscape that we ran into in the late 1990s. We aimed to bridge fields such as IR, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, Criminology, and History, overcoming binaries of inter-state vs. civil war; war vs. peace; political vs. criminal, civilian vs. warrior: building new analytical vocabularies that helped to make sense of our messy and complex empirical observations. We originally built Conflict Studies around a combined set of analytical frames, such as Collective Action Theory and Identity boundary group formation, but are constantly building on this, adding, stacking, merging ideas.
We taught our students to approach conflict through a levels of analysis approach. And to see conflict not as a duel, but as a cluster of conflict, each with different causes and constellations, that intertwine and exacerbate each other. Seeing the task of conflict analysis as to unravel this complex, transforming dynamics of interaction.
We study war as the radical undoing of life, stepping away from militarized ontologies of war, with our focus on civilian harm, perpetrators, violent actors, but also on war’s ecological violence, and war as environmental intervention.
Situating the field
In aiming to situate the field, I cannot help thinking of that other anniversary: the 75th anniversary of NATO. Conflict Studies emerged right in between the 50th and 75th anniversary of NATO. More importantly, our founding in Utrecht in 1999 coincided with the first NATO military intervention “out of area” (the bombing of Former Yugoslavia 1999) since the alliance was established in 1949. Of course we had seen US military interventionism (the war in Vietnam, and the more hidden interventions afterwards) but US-led NATO coalition warfare, including European partners and also the Dutch, set off in the year 1999, really. With Dutch fighter jets throwing cluster bombs on the city of Nis.
Busy setting up our first courses and projects, we did not take this type of warfare into account. Instead, we looked at small wars, intra-state wars, civil wars, and rebellions, insurgencies, guerrillas, gang-violence. Both close to home and across the world: from the French banlieue to the Mara networks in San Salvador, to rebel governance in Sri Lanka, and diasporas in Europe, we were always primarily looking at the non-state actor, the local and everyday dynamics of war.
And if the western state was studied , this was done through the idea of (critiques on) liberal peace, humanitarian and aid interventions, and its machinery in the name of peace and betterment.
However, over the past decades, increasingly our own state became actively involved in waging wars (using labels such as crisis responses, human security and counter-terrorism): from the NATO bombings on Serbia of 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria and Iraq 2014, and the involvement through weaponry and real-time-targetting intel in Ukraine. And the continuous military support for Israel.
We’ve been slow in the take-up to draw these wars into our field of study and bringing the Western-state and geopolitics back in. I, personally, only realized this in 2011, when The Lancet published its (conservative) report on the 600,000 plus civilians who died as a result of the US-UK invasion in Iraq of 2003.
This begs the question of how we as a field helped to uphold a particular hegemonic setting, not so much of the “end of history” but certainly of “the end of realism” or “geopolitics”. How we contributed, unintentionally, to emphasize the violence perpetrated by non-state actors (militias, gangs, rioters, rebels), helping to establish the moral and culturalist frameworks of US-led and NATO warfare in the name of fighting and appeasing the wild, barbaric other, often portrayed through racialized notions of the Islamist terrorist or the African greed-driven rebel.
We were also slow in recognizing that other fields had actively reinvented themselves and increasingly were entering our domain of expertise. Yes, we worked with critical security studies from the start, but only much more recently have we forged new disciplinary partnerships with critical military studies, Feminist IR, political ecology, postcolonial studies, Science and Technology, Geography -- fields with which we share a critique on militarized ontologies and epistemologies of war and violent conflict.
New pathways, new challenges
We’re faced with massive urgencies. We live in radical times: of militarism and brutality. Of a (post) unipolar hegemonic order that is clinging on to power, a time of techno feudalism, and of new oligarchs, in which societies place their hope of solving their very real societal anxieties in the hands of populists.
Conflict Studies is well equipped to study the war complexes, protracted violent conflicts, insecurities and inequalities of today.
I think the panels of today and tomorrow demonstrate this: by delving into questions on the changing character of violence and warfare. We’ll discuss how late modern wars are reshaping the Military Industrial Academic Complex, the role of technologies such as AI, and the interplay between digital warfare and non-state groups. But we also address war’s ecological violence, the role of sanctions as a tool of economic warfare and structural violence.
Importantly, we have also panels on issues of justice and peace: what International Courts can do (and not do) in the face of atrocity crimes, on the ontology of peace, and on everyday peace in the city.
In doing all this work, there is a new side effect. Now that wars so openly involve our own societies (and universities), also our analyses receive new and unexpected (emotional) reactions: we run into regimes of truths; sanctioning who has the authority to speak. Forms of self-censorship, but also propaganda have become very real. How to navigate this?
More than ever, we have to retreat -seek shelter, catch our breath, reflect- to then step out again into the world.
I take inspiration from Edward Said, and I’d like to end by sharing his advice here. These words come from his small, wonderful book Representations of the Intellectual (1994):
No one can speak up all the time on all the issues. But, I believe, there is a special duty to address the constituted and authorized powers of one’s own society, which are accountable to its citizenry, particularly when those powers are exercised in a manifestly disproportionate and immoral war, or in a deliberate program of discrimination, repression, and collective cruelty (p. 98).
This is a call to 'step out of the herd' as D.H. Lawrence would call it, and this can be really lonely. Said compares this to a state of exile:
The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others (Said 1994: 53).
So, let’s do this. Let’s use this conference as a retreat, to debate, and inquire, and surprise and unsettle each other. And hopefully foster new ideas and words to deal with, and be in, this crazy world together.