ABSTRACT
The promotion of war and conflict should not be easy in times of unprecedented interest in global human rights and in the balance between the various parts of the planet. The implicit acceptance of collateral damage, even the acceptance of the concept as such, should normally be impossible in the midst of post-colonial or anti-colonial critique. The notion of 'collateral damage', which admittedly encompasses the depreciation of innocent humans to no more than convenience victims, clashes with almost every fundamental principle of constitutional and criminal law in any Western country. The risk society is a mere epiphenomenon of the erosion of sociality and the collapse of social values as such. Danger becomes somehow the single language that can be shared by otherwise unconnected individuals who have ceased to exert normative control upon each other through their community links. The combination of normative weakness and acute danger awareness has opened a new avenue for the introduction of 'normative otherness'.
