I am grateful to Jennifer Pitts for her thoughtful engagement and important questions. War for Peace was written as a genealogy of the moralities of peace. I wanted to unmask how peace, as a moral ideal, is implicated in violence, dispossession, and global asymmetries. The book examines the discursive structures and logics by which certain groups today are compelled to speak their commitment to peace and their desire for it; in a global, racialized hierarchy of lives, peace-loving signals humanity, and the demand indexes dehumanization. This Nietzschean-Foucauldian frame is fundamental to how I understand the book. It is different from the right to criticize peace, coercive speech, and social inclusion/incivility, which arguably entails a liberal frame.
Peace, power, and violence travel as a constellation. War for Peace assembled a set of thinkers, from Plato to Kant and Qutb, who cite each other and some version of the claim that “war is for the sake of peace.” As a genealogy of a morality, rather than, for example, an exhaustive intellectual history or an assessment of the simple proposition “peace is/is not violent,” the book aimed to demonstrate the unacknowledged, persistent, and importantly dynamic ways in which peace blurs into war and “war for peace” is reiterated. More basically, these are 10 canonical thinkers in political theory, fundamental to the discipline’s culturalized (and periodized) choreography of difference surrounding “Islam” and “the West,” war and peace. The book’s structure takes up the field’s investments in this canon in order to undo the interpretive orthodoxies and illuminate the cultural politics (and, yes, the violence) surrounding its texts and contexts.
War for Peace tracked “three long compulsions that have constituted peace as a morality,” which “should lead us to be less sanguine than contemporary critics might wish to be about how easy and straightforward it may be for the ideal of ‘peace’ to exit or overcome the framework of war” (pp. 7–8). My aim was not to exhaust the range of peace’s political (or nonpolitical) deployments and discursive registers; there are indeed many other formations, structures, and legacies. Pitts notes that War for Peace does not examine Du Bois, Gandhi, Tolstoy, or traditions of nonviolence (the last involves a different set of questions, including the politics of who produces, mobilizes, and consumes nonviolence’s traditions; see pp. xix n24, 8; also Mehta, “Gandhi and the Common Logic of War and Peace,” p. 149). It also does not examine Black Lives Matter theorist-activists, Palestinian resistance, or Turkish civil rights activists. But theorizing “peace” across these thinkers and contemporary movements is not free of violence or outside power. Different and complex as each is, they draw attention to, rather than deflect, the politics and violence of “peace” (as when Du Bois writes that global peace and its racialized hierarchy depends on extraction from colonies to fuel empires’ wars [“Colonies and Peace”] or that white invocations of peace shield the institutions of war that exploit everyone else [Darkwater]). My book invites readers to attend to the productivity and specificity of peace, whether in these thinkers and movements or elsewhere, without deflecting attention from moralized constellations of violence. To treat Du Bois or Gandhi otherwise risks treating them as ambassadors of purity and apolitical morality and peace as a concept outside of politics, as Fanon, Said, and Benjamin might point out, in their own way.
Peace, often contrasted with the truce, colonizes time. The truce, as “peace without insinuates,” is temporally finite and does not sanitize other ideas. All this is crucial for my suggestion of the truce (p. 319) as one of three suppressed formulations embedded in the provincial, polemical, and parasitical. These are not moral alternatives to violence or solutions to war. They are not pure. They may take violent forms. They are not outside politics or even killing. Benton’s discussion illustrates my point. To answer Pitts’s question whether peace, its idealization, or form is the problem, I do not think there is an original sin. Like other moral ideals, it is not outside power and violence.
My point is precisely that peace today is considered the source and site of moralization, liberalism’s ideal of ideals, whose valuation is at odds with the work its invocation does in the world, precisely because it is not treated as a political concept but as a human desire and moral ideal.
War for Peace takes aim at a number of orthodoxies. I tried to dismantle both the status of peace and its canonical thinkers (including readings of Kant that treat his ambivalences, humor, or second thoughts as anticolonial critique rather than reflecting empire’s operations). Given what I outline throughout the book about the operations of peace disciplinarily and globally, this is the book that needed writing, not one that demands nonviolence or celebrates an alternative peace and thereby obscures its imbrication with violence and war. To adapt Nietzsche, the moralization of peace is soaked in blood—and for a very long time.
