The problem

THE word peace, its meanings, connotations, the very semiotics of the word has become contentious. Peace is often seen minimally as the absence of war, the availability of order based on some sense of contract. Here peace becomes more a product, a politics of manufacture than a process or a ritual of conversation sustained through mutual understanding. The latter is almost constructed like an act of scientism by experts on security, who see little difference between peace and plumbing. This issue on peace movements looks at peace as a pilgrimage, an act of ethics which has become political. It looks at peace as a lived process, through the example of peaceniks who have confronted the problems of war and violence. The essays almost begin biographically as acts of confession, statement of vulnerability contending against the need for vengeance and violence.

Peace cannot be seen merely as a process of problem solving, a sense of fixing, repair. It has to be read as epic, understood as myth. Theatre with its sense of socio drama, its celebration of language and performance fits the contours of a peace narrative.

Language and morality becomes central as one explores the nuances, the possibilities of peace where memory becomes crucial as one explores the past for the seeds of wisdom. The question one has to explore through constant acts of rereading is what do epics and myths teach us? Do we reread the variants looking for new ideas of peace and the meaning of war?

An act of rereading has to be accompanied by a sense of experiment, which emphasizes both the playfulness and inventiveness peace demands. Often scholarship treats peace as a project, a design like a rocket project with designated sequences rather than a world of ironies and surprises. The dreariness of peace as a dismal science often stems from the mediocrity of International Relations as a subject thriving on the immaculateness of the nation state as an idea, thriving on the sacrosanct idea of borders and treating security and the national security state as a new source of the sacred. One rarely explores the iatrogenic nature of international relations where concepts like security create the self-fulfilling prophecies of war. One has to challenge the notion of peace as a form of professional expertise, and examine peace as a process open to all people. International Relations (IR) as a subject needs an exorcism where it collectively rereads the frequency of war in modern times and searches for the creativity of new concepts, where the authenticity of language, the power of storytelling becomes part of the process of peace building.

We need to psychoanalyze IR and the hegemony of security as dominant discourse. Implicit in this is a need to challenge peace as a contract between states and examine the role of civil society. There is a need to pluralize discourses to make peace more effective. History becomes important here and a rereading of the UN, of the Cold War, of the long narratives of the region, becomes critical. The Cold War is over, the Berlin Wall has become a tourist’s delight and yet how does one read the Cold War today? What can the so called neutral countries learn from the Cold War? More immediately how do we rethink regional institutions like the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) which are clerical as an imagination and limited in agency. Can we invent a new SAARC as a protean agency? These are some of the challenges we face today.

But when we focus on peace we have to reverse the end of the telescope. Drifting away from the state, one has to look at the range of vulnerabilities the narcissism of the nation state has created. We need a theory of the margins as a subcontinent of alternative imaginations reading the marginal, the nomad, the displaced, the politics of victimhood, that the nation state and the security system have created. Citizenship today seems more a clerical notion requiring identification rather than the phenomenology of identity. How do we create a less procrustean idea of citizenship more open to hospitability where borders become more porous, seen more as thresholds rather than fences, acquiring their power from liminality rather than the fixity of a fetishized moment of history? The refugee today not only challenges the very fixity of citizenship but becomes a challenge to conscience.

How do we construct the refugee? Do we assign him a permanent homelessness? One needs a moral imagination that goes beyond the humanitarianism of the UN. The question of the Rohingya becomes central in this context. The Rohingya is a construct of different kinds of distancing and indifference today. Does the Rohingya crisis and the trauma of the Assam Register, the courts eviction of two million tribals, indicate a banalization of violence, a gulagization of a people? We do not need a Stalin to create gulags today. As a state of the mind and a statement of policy, any clerk can create it as a banal act of governance. The reflexivity of concepts has to go further and look at everdayness in other contexts. Can we create a different phenomenology of protest movements, where science is literally challenged by a home science of anxieties, doubts and suspicions without the latter being dismissed as non-expert and irrational?

While peace and the search for peace demands the urgency and immediacy of conscience, it also needs models of peace based on explorations in literature and philosophy where a Dara Shikoh or a Kabir becomes as relevant as a Johan Galtung or a Simone Weil. Peace needs a new kind of storytelling, a more vital discourse which emphasizes the logic of pluralism. It demands that democracy experiment with the ethical and transform the vibrancy of the ethical into the permanence of the institutional. Is a Peace Constitution a possibility for India or do we remain kneejerk, content with security as a Linus blanket as we think of Kashmir, Pakistan or China?

The essays in this issue of Seminar are a set of explorations in that direction. They are an invitation to the commons of peace and peace building that civil society is desperately seeking to create around a reworked idea of the university, the courage of social movements and a sense of citizenship, which break through the passiveness of today. One hopes it is the beginning, the ethical startup of more systematic efforts in the future. In this sense it is a statement of hope, an excitement about a experiment which might forge the new building blocks for a more resilient peace.

ADITI, KALIKA MEHTA, SHIV VISVANATHAN

 

* This issue on peace is dedicated to two individuals who worked creatively for peace: Rajni Kothari and Johan Galtung.