WHO Violence cuts short the lives of millions of people across the world each year, and damages the lives of millions more. It knows no boundaries of geography, race, age or income. It strikes at children, young people, women and the elderly. It finds its way into homes, schools and the workplace. Men and women everywhere have the right to live their lives and raise their children free from the fear of violence. We must help them enjoy that right by making it clearly understood that violence is preventable, and by working together to identify and address its underlying causes.

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World report on violence and health

Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

https://blogs.ubc.ca/lebillon/files/2015/01/ecowar.pdf

The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed conflicts

* Foreword by Antonio Donini * Preface to the critique influence change edition * 1. Introduction: The New Development-Security Terrain * 2. The Merging of Development and Security * 3. Strategic Complexes and Global Governance * 4. The New Humanitarianism * 5. Global Governance and the Causes of Conflict * 6. The Growth of Transborder Shadow Economies * 7. Non-Liberal Political Complexes and the New Wars * 8. Internal Displacement and the New Humanitarianism: Displacement and Complicity in Sudan (Part 1) * 9. Aid and Social Subjugation: Displacement and Complicity in Sudan (Part 2) * 10. Conclusion: Global Governance, Moral Responsibility and Complexity - Internal Displacement and the New Humanitarianism

Global governance and the new wars : the merging of development and security

Global governance and the new wars

As the rising death toll among humanitarian aid workers suggests, saving strangers has become a dangerous occupation. In addressing the consequences of this increase, this article begins by placing...

The Liberal Way of Development and the Development-Security Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide

This paper provides a critical alternative to two key aspects of conventional wisdom in international policy. First, the prevailing notion of internal or intra‐state war as bounded by traditional views of the nation‐state. Second, the development model of conflict which regards so‐called internal war as originating from poverty, scarcity or weak institutions. In distinction, the idea of post‐modern conflict addresses the emergence of political projects in the South, including qualified state forms, which no longer need to establish territorial, bureaucratic or consent‐based political authority. Moreover, rather than scarcity or breakdown, despite the high social costs involved, protracted instability can be associated with innovative and expanding forms of political economy. Using material from Africa and the European East, the paper examines some of the relations and structures involved. Warlords, for example, have forged new and viable links with international organisations and global markets. At the sa...

Post‐modern conflict: Warlords, post‐adjustment states and private protection

That democratic societies do not fall into conflict has become an axiom of contemporary international relations. Liberal societies, however, do not properly exist along the troubled margins of the global order. This absence has lent urgency to present efforts at social reconstruction. Whereas a couple of decades ago the principle of non–interference prevailed, this unfinished business has shaped a new will to intervene and transform societies as a whole. This article critically analyses the international will to govern through three interconnected themes. First, it examines accepted views on the nature of the new wars. These representations usually portray conflict as a form of social regression stemming from the failure of modernity. As such, they provide a moral justification for intervention. Second, an alternative view of the new wars — as a form of resistant and reflexive modernity — is developed. Made possible by the opportunities created by globalization, this resistance assumes the organizational form of network war. The essay concludes with an examination of the encounter between the international will to govern and the resistance of reflexive modernity. This encounter is the site of the post–Cold War reuniting of aid and politics. One important consequence has been the radicalization of development and its reinvention as a strategic tool of conflict resolution and social reconstruction. The use of aid as a tool of global liberal governance is fraught with difficulty; not least, the equivocal and contested nature of its influence. Rather than reconsideration, however, policy failure tends to result in a fresh round of reinvention and reform. The increasing normalization of violence is but one effect.

Mark Duffield

Papers

Global governance and the new wars : the merging of development and security

Global governance and the new wars

The Liberal Way of Development and the Development-Security Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide

Post‐modern conflict: Warlords, post‐adjustment states and private protection

Social reconstruction and the radicalization of development : aid as a relation of global liberal governance.