I applied to be admitted as a masters’ student in King’s College’s War Studies Department because I am determined to reach my long-term goal to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to contribute, to the best of my abilities, in the conceptual elaboration and practical implementation of a post-Westphalian international order articulated around a new paradigm of ethical peace which “imagines a universal moral community in which no ethical obligation can be traded away in times of emergency, and no humans can be put in mortal danger so that others may be safe”.

Growing up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, I was indoctrinated with a view of history, politics and warfare bearing little relationship to actual reality. The only discordant voice in the reassuring uniformity of official recounts of heroic communist triumphs in a “just war” against fascist barbarism was that of my grand-father, born on the eve of the Great War, an Artillery Officer in World War II –and a master story-teller. It is from him that I first heard fantastic tales of vast armies engaged in titanic contests of wills, of shrapnel fragments decimating entire units, of long years of imprisonment, suffering and survival spent with fellow Romanians, Hungarians, Germans and Italians in the Soviet Union. Years later, on the other side of the Curtain, after living in a pre-civil war Algeria and in a still-divided West Germany, I picked up the thread of my grand-father’s epic story as I emigrated to Canada, in the early 1980s, at the height of the Second Cold War. I gladly volunteered to join the Canadian Armed Forces, first as a Private, then as a 2. Lieutenant, to give something back to the country that gave me a new home -where freedom, dignity, and justice where not only empty words scribbled in irrelevant constitutions, but a true creed and an actual way of life. Although never exposed to the “shock and awe” of real enemy fire, I learned first-hand what war meant at the individual level, where soldiers put their lives in the hands of their fellow soldiers and always strive to fulfill their mission, no matter what the personal cost. Finally, after studying humanitarian, refugee and international law and politics in both Canada and the United Kingdom over a period of almost two decades and grappling with fascinating theoretical issues and academic controversies in these and related fields at undergraduate and postgraduate levels as well as in self-directed research and writing, I had to deal, face to face, after my return to Canada, with real victims of repressions, internal displacements, wars, and even genocides. These men, women and children had kept hoping against hope and survived horrific events most of us are familiar with only from disembodied digital images we keep seeing all too often at dinner time, on our evening news, or sometimes in movie theatres. They now were putting their and their families’ future into our hands, entrusting me and my colleagues with the arduous task of persuading a Canadian Tribunal that they were indeed either genuine refugees as defined by the Geneva Convention or persons in need of protection, rather than economic migrants deserving nothing more than being deported back to their country of origin. The responsibility was almost overwhelming -but less so than the exhilarating feelings of sheer joy, relief and happiness we could plainly see on their faces when, more often than not, their claims were accepted and they were allowed to start (as I once had done) a new, better life in their adoptive country.

It is quite ironic that, just at the moment when I compose this statement attempting to explain my aptitudes for and interest in a postgraduate course focusing on war in the 21st century, armed conflict – and its consequences – dominates our television screens, newspapers, blogs and even self-posted on-line videos. On the eighth day of the Israeli military intervention in Lebanon, as ground combat begins, casualties mount and refugee flows grow exponentially, all sides directly or indirectly involved in this complex conflict claim that theirs is a “just war” fully justifying –even legitimating– their military actions and interventions, in accordance with the same conceptual framework –if not quite the same specific vocabulary- of simplistic, binary oppositions between Ally and Enemy, Right and Wrong, Self and Other as was used, mirror-like, on both sides of the Iron Curtain during four long decades of mutual mistrust, fear, intimidation and threats of Mutual Assured Destruction. How distant seem the times, barely a decade ago, when the rise of a multilateral and interdependent regime of global governance based on clear principles of international law and UN-sanctioned actions seemed a fait acquis –where the old paradigm of national security, dating back to the end of World War II, and described as an inherently adversarial national security paradigm (ANSP) was destined to end, like the former Soviet Union, on the ash heap of history, and be replaced by a consciously cooperative global security paradigm (CGSP). This paradigm, articulated perhaps in its purest form by Prime Minister Tony Blair in his “Doctrine of the International Community” unveiled in a speech in April 1999, in front of the Chicago Economic Club, defined war not as a unilateral exercise of military power in defense of our –that is, Western- security and values by any means available, including pre-emption and preventive war, but rather as a policy of last resort couched within the framework of international institutions and the global community. And yet, even here, the notion of “just war” took pride of place – despite Blair’s famous assertion that “[w]e are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not”: a “just war” could be defined by means of globally accepted, universal standards of justice, and be based not on any territorial ambitions, but on the specific moment when “values and interests merge”. Burke’s apt observation that our various moral discourses of strategic violence, from the realist to the liberal to the neo-Augustinian have internalized the Clausewitzian assumption that “war is both a normal and a rational pursuit of political ends”, was entirely accurate even before its renewed prominence since 9/11.

I was therefore not in the least surprised to see that, after a decade when it was de rigueur to assert that Clausewitz and his magnum opus On War had ceased to be a helpful guide to war in the post-1989 age (John Keegan, A history of warfare (1993); Martin van Creveld, The transformation of war (1991); and Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (1999)), the famous Prussian war theoretician and practitioner is again back in fashion with academics and politicians alike. Oxford University’s three-day conference, held in March 2005 under the auspices of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War and gathering experts from across Europe and the Americas was fittingly entitled “Clausewitz in the 21st Century” and discussed, among others, Clausewitz’s image of war as a physical and moral struggle (Beatrice Heuser (Department of Military History, Bundeswehr)), the critical contemporary question regarding what kind of politics will follow today’s wars -favouring the Clausewitzian idea that strategic thinking is a kind of art rather than a matter of science (José Fernández Vega (Argentine National Research Council)); and a conception of “limitation of war and violence” as the overarching purpose of politics in the 21st century, derived from Clausewitz’s basic differentiation between limited and unlimited warfare and emphasis on the priority of politics (Andreas Herberg-Rothe (Humboldt University Berlin)). More recently, former U.K. Secretary of Defense John Reid, in his seminal speech at King’s College, London, in February 2006, in which he outlined his view that our Armed Forces “fight today in a changed and hugely uneven Battlefield”, emphasized that “the real-time media scrutiny of war, on a scale and a level of intrusiveness inconceivable only a few decades ago… does not merely enable political involvement in the conduct of the campaign, but insists on it” -and argued that, as a familiar of Clausewitz’s writings, he was not surprised by this development since “…he never argued that political discourse is suspended when war breaks out, but that it continues to shape and constrain the conduct of warfare”. If, however, we are to accept, in line with Clausewitz, the use of war as policy, we must strive to develop a moral and analytical framework better capable of dealing with historical and geopolitical complexity than the currently fashionable notion of “just war” is capable of doing –by treating war “as part of a historical and policy continuum rather than an isolated event limited to the conduct of high-intensity military operations whose impact can somehow be limited in time, scope and spatial reach”.

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Over the past two decades, I have devoted the vast majority of my professional and academic careers as well as almost my entire self-directed research and active political involvement to the study and elaboration of such a moral and analytical framework, where military power takes its rightful place as one of four sources of social power, constantly interacting with, modifying, and being changed, in time and space, by three other such sources –namely political, economic and ideological sources of power, together constituting what Michael Mann calls the IEMP model of social power. I believe that only by developing a deep understanding of each of these four sources of social power’s unique attributes, as well as of the manner in which they interact, crystallize in specific social formations at particular points in time and space, then become dislocated and start changing again, will we truly grasp the critical importance of the times we live in, acquire the capacity to reflect critically upon the self-dissolution and self-endangerment of our global society, and hence, the ability to channel and steer the twin processes of globalisation and fragmentation which define the spatio-temporal parameters of our present condition in a direction of our own, conscious choosing.

As Braudel stated and Wallerstein reminds us, “[e]vents make no sense unless we can insert them in the rhythms of the conjunctures and the trends of the longue durée”. We find ourselves today at a point of systemic bifurcation where the Westphalian international order, based on specific and static understandings of the fundamental dichotomies between Unity and Diversity, Self and Other and Space and Time, and irreversibly structured by the foundational, reified construct of the territorially-defined, sovereign nation-state, is rapidly decaying. The transformation of this system can go in radically different directions because even small inputs at such a bifurcation point can have great consequences. I am certain that the manner in which warfare and conflict resolution will be conducted in the twenty-first century will constitute the critical factor which will decide this era’s decisive battle: the titanic struggle between the ossified institutional structure of the territorially-defined, sovereign nation-state, desperately trying to arrest time’s inexorable forward movement and to prolong its anachronistic survival in an era which is no longer its own – and the already visible contours of a new world view defined by an inclusive political order, more democratic, less unequal and more sensitive to cultural differences than the totalising project which characterizes its opponent’s ethics of absolute exclusion. Only if we succeed in this endeavor will we be able, eventually, to shift the normative ideal of our frameworks for the moral justification (and limitation) of the strategic violence constitutive of military power -or, as Mann puts it, “the social organization of concentrated lethal violence”– from a notion of “just war” which has repeatedly failed us in the past and continues to do so today, “at a cost of thousands of innocent lives and at the risk of creating a future in which we are not free of terror but condemned to its permanent presence” –to that of “ethical peace” – which imagines the use of strategic violence “in strictly limited situations and under conditions far more stringent than have so far been provided by either realism, just war theory or international law”.