Here is a book that proposes us to look with new eyes the stories that justify power, and to suspect all violence that is presented as necessary, inevitable or minor. And it is that of all the violence, infinite, that soak the history of the world, one is especially aberrant: the one that comes from the State or of any political organization, legitimized with laws or justifications for the gallery that hide a bottomless well of lies or concealments. We say it about the book «They called him peace. The violence of the empires »(translation of Efrén del Valle)in one of whose most revealing passages it is said: “Our goal should not be to help humanity to dominate the art of war, but to understand the trajectory of this: the logic and practices that move the antagonists with exquisite precision from one conflict to another and of the moderation exercises to the edge of the atrocity.”
The author’s phrase, Lauren Benton, condenses the purpose that guides this work: denaturalize political violence examining her historical patterns, her pretexts and progressive climbing in the framework of the great empires, from the fifteenth century to the present day. It is, then, of an ambitious and original essay that presents a radical turn: Place the so -called “minor wars” in the center of global history.
That is, their intention is not to highlight those wars celebrated by the nationalist epic or studied in diplomatic treaties, but to stop in the “limited” campaigns, “preventive incursions”, “humanitarian displays”, “peacekeeping”, “surgical interventions” that populated the political vocabulary of imperial power from the conquest of America to the war against the war against terrorism.
In this way, from its first pages, Benton strives to dismantle the idea that minor wars are a marginal or accidental phenomenon. On the contrary, says this natural historian of Baltimore: they were the most common mechanism of the imperial order. “The empires specialized in violence in the threshold between war and peace,” he writes. This violence of “low level” – routine, legally ambiguous, socially invisible – was the basis of territorial control, economic domination and cultural imposition of European empires.
Programmed violence
From the first captive practices in the context of the Iberian expansions, through the looting regimes organized in the colonial borders, to the supposedly “disciplined” military operations of the nineteenth century, the book addresses very different situations and epochs. In that process, the author shows how a legal and moral rhetoric was built that allowed to justify the unjustifiable: kill, displace, enslave, sweep, all in the name of civilization and progress. In their own words: “As Europeans affirmed their right to establish the laws of war and intervene anywhere to protect subjects and imperial interests, they were forming an extensive armed peace regime dominated by a handful of world powers.” Here, the criticism of nineteenth -century international law and its Eurocentric foundations is incisive, and clearly connects with current debates about “legal” and “humanitarian.”
Dramatic rupturra
Benton also emphasizes the “broken rhythm” of imperial violence. Unlike the stories that conceive war as a dramatic break with peace, it suggests thinking of violence as a form of continuity: a sequence of acts that are normalized by repetition, bureaucratization and narrative justification. Thus, he argues that empires were not mainly based on states of exception – as Carl Schmitt held, for whom the sovereign is the one who decides when to suspend the legal order – but on a form of continuous and systematic violence. The author argues that the usual in the empires was a violence of “low level”, exercised routinely through mechanisms as repression, punishment or territorial control, without the need to declare extraordinary situations.
Although the thought of Schmitt is mentioned and discussed – Not without critically highlighting his link with Nazism, “the book distances itself from it. Instead of focusing on exceptional moments, it focuses on how daily, sustained and apparently lower violence was the true foundation of imperial power.
This normality included expropriation campaigns, enslavement of civilians and the use of hunger as a weapon against entire cities. In the author’s words: “Her reference state was low level violence.” The result, in short, is a genealogy of the war that enters the systematic forms of legitimized violence. Therefore, it is a look that decentralizes Europe and relocates colonial suffering – it has been hidden under the rhetoric of “pacification” – in the heart of the analysis.
Far from being limited to the past, the book draws a direct line between historical imperial violence and current conflicts. Thus, American drones in Afghanistan, Russian invasion to Ukraine or interventions not declared in the African Sahel appear as extensions – with new means – of an ancient logic. “Today’s warmongers resemble the agents of the empires,” says Benton, referring to current speeches that justify the use of force with protection, order or stability arguments.
The clearest example is that of Dron’s attack in Kabul in 2021 that killed several children: an episode presented as part of a “selective attack program”, and that the book links to the “surgical” war techniques developed by imperial powers in previous centuries.
Language
This work is also lucid the reflection on the language and the consequences it has, which can question the lexicon we use when we refer to these issues and that we all know: terms such as “intervention”, “Mission of Peace” or “collateral damage” are direct heirs of a tradition that bleached violence under the mask of progress. Certainly, the way Vladimir Putin avoided, for many months, Use the word “war” to refer to the invasion he had instigated in Ukraine –Opart by the already known formula of «Special Military Operation» – shows, in the eyes of the author, the persistence of an imperial logic that still survives in our societies and in our day.
It is the same type of euphemism that colonial killings hid for centuries under the name of “punishment expeditions” or “patifications.” The book, in the end, reflects on whether the history of the qualified wars of “minors” teaches us that violence disguises itself and also naturalizes. But then what to do with pacifism? Is it possible to defend an ethic of nonviolence in a world where empires – and their direct heirs – continue to appeal to war as an instrument of order?
Of course, there are no easy answers to these questions. In fact, the story “may not be a useful guide for action,” says Benton. And yet, “at least, we can expect the policy of the past to educate us, by analogy, about the policy of the present.” In sum, “they called him peace” is a work that, above all, is an invitation to read the world we live of the world order.
- The best: show that imperial violence was no exception, but a systemic norm
- The worst: a deeper reflection on contemporary forms of resistance is avoided