- 著者
-
日野 文
- 出版者
- ロシア・東欧学会
- 雑誌
- ロシア・東欧研究 (ISSN:13486497)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.2012, no.41, pp.45-60, 2012 (Released:2014-05-27)
- 参考文献数
- 53
The conceptualization of new wars has altered the way in which we comprehend violence, identity, and politics in the post-Cold War era, and reconfigured our conviction of ethics, morality, and ‘the political.’ In particular, the second implication of the conception of new wars is significant, as that the de novo proposed ethics, morality, and ‘the political’ de-legitimize the conventional Westphalian mode of understanding modern politics, and offer a possibility of universal cosmopolitan platform, the politics of inclusion, for dealing with violence. This article, from a social constructivist perspective, aims at reconsidering the new wars thesis and more specifically the epistemological problem behind the proposed cosmopolitan solution. My problematization of new wars thesis brings to the fore the Yugoslav conflict as the main empirical reference point, aiming to reveal the discursive construction of the representation of the conflict as an embodiment of the characteristics of new wars. Any representation is a paradigmatic form of reality and has in itself a representational temporarily. It is because the construction of representation is subject to the circumstances directly transmitted from the past and the circumstances directly influenced by particular spatio-temporal contexts. Therefore, the representational construction of the Yugoslav conflict as an archetype of new war has to be understood as a mode of perceiving the seemingly incomprehensible violence witnessed within the post-Cold War context. By offering a reading of new wars thesis as a rhetorical paradigm, this article suggests two problems of the thesis and proposed cosmopolitan solution. First, the characterization of the Yugoslav conflict as an archetype of new wars is not particularly helpful to alter the history-long balkanist representation of self/other relationship; instead it has reinforced some negative connotations of Yugoslavia as the other. That is, the thesis transforms mere appearances of the conflict into the essence, which reinforces otherness and inferiority of Yugoslavia. This essentialization constitutes a ground for rationalizing a new ‘civilizing’ mission of the West under the guise of global civil society with its seemingly universal ethics and morality. Hence, the second problem is that the cosmopolitan solution for new wars is not as inclusive as it proposes itself to be, as that its inclusiveness is dependent upon certain conditions derived from particular western ethics, morality, and ideal type of how society ought to be instituted. Because ethics, morality, and ideal type of society are not singular but plural conceptions, linking them to the cosmopolitan politics of collective deliberation simply indicates exclusion of something unethical, immoral, and defective from the very politics of cosmopolitan solution. Though ‘the political’ within the cosmopolitan global civil society might be based on freedom and public deliberation, the antagonistic dichotomies are inherent features of ‘the political’ of such a global platform. That said, this article concludes that the new wars thesis has effectively constructed another paradigm of representing Yugoslavia, and importantly rearticulated the relative superiority of civic West, by reifying the polarity of heterogeneous domains, such as West and non-West, us and them, civic and ethnic, and ideal and defective.