Humanity & Conflicts clinch in a Tragic Embrace - The Human & Institutional Spoils of Interventionist Warfare -RL Vol XI No XVII, CXXIV, MMXVII

If war is the worst enemy of development ever seen, healthy & balanced development is the preferred form of conflict prevention. Kofi Annan, 1999.

Humanity & Conflicts clinch in a Tragic Embrace

The Human & Institutional Spoils of Interventionist Warfare

Public Lecture – RL Vol XI No XVII, CXXIV, MMXVII

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD

Professor of Public Policy, School of Graduate Studies,

College of Business and Economics, AAU

Abstract

Is it a fact that states might want to uphold conflicts in their search for stable surroundings or ‘ontological security’. How could it be possible that a state might covet a conflict? We assume states want to avoid conflict. Yet there are cases where parties seem deeply attached to the conflict that seems to be keeping the conflict alive. Realists who look to the security dilemma would explain this anomaly with the concept of uncertainty (Schouten, 2009:1). In 1967, The US Blue Ribbon Commission wrote a secret report entitled Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. The substance of the document are unsettling. That medical advances are viewed more as problems than as progress; or that poverty is necessary and desirable, public postures by politicians to the contrary notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other things social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as are old-people's homes and mental hospitals (The Blue Ribbon Commission, 1967).

The intervention of Nato in Libya’s annihilation, the foreign support to regime change in Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan and the Afro-Arab Winter are all that still haunt the architects of these conflicts. The human and institutional costs are too ghastly to contemplate even for the warmonger minds of these last horses of the apocalypse. The West’s engagement in Libya has created a failed state leaving behind an arena for warring factions, armed to the teeth with weapons provided directly by allies effectively transforming a peaceful, prosperous African country into a classic paragon of a phantom state. The fact is that foreign powers that would like to parachute democracy into these lands often do not efficiently realise in practice the potential of the ideas and goals they promote. Hence, the volume of their interventions is not nearly proportional to their impact raises the issue of whether the ideas in question may be fundamentally constrained at the exact moment of their conception by the very institutions and technocratic structures that ground their articulation. It enters politics and society in relatively abstract and plain form, yet pundits expect it to land itself to the immediate and vital Afro-Arab polity's socio-political experience. It insinuates itself, and seems within grasp, only to evade action and appears readily realisable only to resist fulfilment.

Key words: intervention, conflicts, wars, impact, ontological security, 

See paper here or https://www.academia.edu/33930621/The_Human_and_Institutional_Spoils_of_Interventionist_Warfare_-_Vol_XI_No_XVII_CXXIV_MMXVII.pdf