ABSTRACT
The general movement of this study has been toward crisis – a large crisis in world society and a small crisis in the field of conflict studies. We began by showing that many violent conflicts are not just the results of misunderstanding or malice but are generated by oppressive and exploitative social structures. We then explored the socioeconomic and cultural dimensions of certain local conflicts (crime and punishment in particular) and discussed their relationship to a ‘total system’ of globalizing capitalism. Finally, discussing religiously motivated conflict, we linked this system to neo-imperialism and raised the question of the state’s role in maintaining the current world order. The large crisis, it seems to me, is the result of an attempt to keep this global system afloat notwithstanding its instability and vast, regular production of violence. Military confrontations and buildups involving other Great Powers (or would-be empires) are now taking place all along the borders of regions dominated by the United States and its allies, from Eastern Europe and Ukraine to the South China Sea. The current moment, with its spread of global insurgencies and its endless war on terror, may actually be seen as a kind of hiatus in violence compared with the inter-imperialist wars that took more than 100 million lives in the twentieth century; a level of violence that may well resume unless the present order is restructured.
