War In Peace
Ananda Commaraswamy Mawatha is now ‘Nelum Pokuna Mawatha’
Sunday, August 19, 2012
The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves. – Foucault.The word ‘peace’ can connote the presence of a good degree of justice and harmony, or the absence of (overt, armed and violent) conflict. The observation in his treatise On War by Carl von Clausewitz (1780 – 1831) – “war is the continuation of politics by other means” – is well-known. (See also ‘The Art of War’ by Sun-tzu, BCE 380 – 316, and ‘The Arthashastra’ by Kautilya.) Among Michael Foucault’s chief concerns is the question of power: its forms and manifestations; its workings and effect. Power is not to be associated only with force, punishment and repression by the state. It functions also at the sub-state level; is regulatory and ‘productive’, for example, of discourse. Foucault, inverting Clausewitz, says that politics is the continuation of war by other means. Political power puts an end to war, but not in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed by the last battle of the war (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended). On the contrary, the state can use military victory to re-inscribe that relationship of force in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even on the bodies of individuals (op. cit.). From the 1910s to the early 1970s, aboriginal children of mixed race were placed in white foster-homes or settlement camps in a policy of forced assimilation that sought to “speed the disappearance of aboriginal culture” (Michael Sandel, Justice, 2010).
