One of the most disturbing features of the world in which we all now inhabit is that the speed and nature of change moving at a velocity beyond our ability grasp its implications. Not only have many of the conceptual means available to make sense of what is occurring become redundant, but so too have the responsive actions to change.
This situation especially, if not exclusively, applies to war. In particular, it is subject to significant and far reaching change from three major global dynamic forces: the reconfiguration of geopolitical power structures that unevenly will effect everyone everywhere; growing planetary population and natural resource pressures combined with increasing enviro-climatic impacts, all with long term future consequences for life on Earth; and an ever more rapid process of the transformation of multiple technologies with often ill-understood psycho-social affects. These multiple forces have created critical conditions that have the possibility to slide into a catastrophic crisis. It against this backdrop that the concept and proto-practice of Unstaging War arrives, and in doing so it asserts the need for appropriate, effective and imaginative ideas and responsive action to change as characterised.
What Unstaging War offers is one fragile starting point that is still āwork in progressā created with the intent of initiating a developable process of critical review, conceptualisation and proto-practice advancement. In doing this the well-worn practice of putting forward a āresolvedā model of an abstracted theoretical solution is rejected. It is viewed as a form of utopian fantasy, as there is never a solution without an agent of realisation. Saying this does not imply a turning away from theory, but directing it toward understanding āthe problemā at a fundamental level before any pursuit of solutions, which is something the desire for a solution often fails to do.
The Changing Nature of the World: A Brief Outline
Geopolitically, the on going reconfiguration of the geometry of power between the worldās power blocs is creating a more uncertain and potentially dangerous future. The contraction of the role of the U.S. in the world, its disposition toward economic protectionism, and a weakening of its security ties to its global allies; the territorial expansion and sphere of influence of China in the East and South China Seas; Russiaās regional ambitions and international destabilising actions; the prospect of increased contestation by global powers over natural resources, especially as global warming continues to bring previously unreachable minerals within the reach of exploration; and the prospect of greater nuclear arms proliferation and a new nuclear arms race āthese are but a few examples of a fluid and very complex geopolitical dynamic, within which there are existing and potential flashpoints.
Layered over this situation are the serious and still only partly known consequences, including the impacts of climate change upon a whole range of critical factors including biodiversity, sea level rises, global food security with agricultural systems under stress, population displacement and problems of mass migration, and public health risks from increases in vector carried disease. Not only do the impacts well exceed this sample but also they are likely to increase in number and severity over time irrespective of tardy and insufficient mitigation measures that have been, and are being, taken. Additionally, as will be seen later, climate change poses major dangers as a cause of conflict.
As for technology, its transformative effects are destined to increasingly change our being, lives and future at a profound ontological level. The very nature of our being appears to have started to fracture with at one extreme a synthesis of biology and technology underway, with designed forms of the post-human being claimed as in process. Such transformations of the de-naturalising nature of āourā essential being are also seen as extending to physiological, cognitive and psychological dimensions. At the other extreme there is the abandonment of a significant segment of the human population to a condition of de-humanisation as new structure of inequality starts to arrive. More prosaically technology has, and is, changing the nature of work, social relations, communications, transport, education, knowledge, intelligence, memory, medicine, materials, food, and of course war and its weapons of mass destruction ānot only can such a listing continue, but everything on it feeds back to contribute to the differences of āourā ontological transformation.
The complexity of what has just been outlined is not only far greater than has been briefly detailed but is not contained by the categories employed. The complexity of this complexity is relational. Effectively our species has created a world of complexity within āthe worldā of a complexity beyond its comprehension as a condition of existence. The fundamental contradiction of so much of what was/is created to constitute and protect our material future is negating it, and so is effectively defuturing. War placed in the contradiction of this context is a very crude and ambiguous instrument indeed to ādealā with problems of this world, be it delivered with extremely sophisticated organisational and technological means in support of āresolvingā a crisis.
The Challenge
The present age has been defined as the Anthropocene. It names that moment in planetary time of the displacement of the Holocene in which the totality of the impacts of our species has put life on Earth itself at risk. Such negation can be seen to arrive from various directions: the sum of all that forms the collective effect of defuturing is one characterisation. Another is the announcement by evolutionary biologists that the planetās sixth extinction event has commenced, as an event initiated by us.1 Although the number of people on the planet who know of the planetary conditions gathered under the name Anthropocene is still small, the numbers who experience these conditions as they specifically arrive in a situated local context is becoming very large. As a result there are many millions who are physically unsettled by what is happening, but hundreds of millions who witness what is changing and as a result are by degree experiencing unsettlement psychologically.
The situation is critical, the dangers are huge and the risk of conflict sparked by them high. If we as a species are to survive the enormous challenge to be confronted unquestionably means fundamental changes in our mode of earthly habitation and conduct. Currently world leaders, and their governments and international organisations, are failing to recognise and respond to the scale this critical situation. They are unable to transcend existing agendas, and go beyond pragmatically adjusting their particular relation to maintaining business as usual. The complexity they confront simply does not, cannot or will not recognise the extent of the actual complexity of our species condition as progenitors and victims of a wider and increasing crisis of life on Earth.
Obviously meeting the challenge our species faces will require a massive transformative and adaptive effort over an extensive span of time, even though itās short as crisis looms. Whatever action is taken it has to be substantial, cannot be painless, and will be fraught with danger. The message is simple: if āweā are to have a future there is no choice but to act, but the action is extraordinarily difficult. In such global circumstances where a large-scale escalation of defuturing problems is underway, the risk of conflict is high. It follows that it is vital to prefigure ways to avoid this happening while also de-escalating any violence already occurring. The imperative has to be to make time toward establishing more sustainable futures by slowing down, or halting, all that defutures.
Unstaging War
The case for Unstaging War first comes with the recognition of, and then a move toward responding to, the context outlined. It asserts that it is vital to create new ways to reduce risks of substantial and potentially catastrophic conflict over coming decades and beyond. The case to be made equally understands that while the rhetoric of peace endures, the actual binary relation between war and peace is now brokenāthis is a problem begging address. Appeals to peace, and its international instruments and institutions, have demonstratively shown themselves as lacking the agency to deal with extant conflicts, let alone those coming from greater risks implicit in now changing global circumstances. So positioned as affirmatively reactive, how Unstaging War will be approached needs qualification.
As a potentially major new proto counter-discourse in early formation, with a central idea grounded in process and innovatory practices, Unstaging War aims not only to challenge many currently held views on war and peace but proposes a very different way to counter a historical and internationally widespread propensity to war. More than this it also confronts the abysmal relation between war and the unsustainable while affirming the continual attainment of what at any historical moment seems to be impossible.
Obviously, as indicated, Unstaging War is not posed as fully packaged universal solution. Rather it is presented as an idea and proto-practice to be developed and tested as a situationally adaptive process. Its development b...