ABSTRACT
This chapter explores dehumanization as a key factor justifying violence in regular and irregular conflicts, including savage wars. The notion of savage wars has a broad meaning, including colonial or civil wars in the past, as well as contemporary asymmetrical warfare conducted by irregular forces of non-state actors, characterized by the disregard for, or violation of, international law and rules of engagement. Extreme and unlawful violence, including mass killings, genocide and politicide, is not only common in savage wars, but it becomes widespread due to the dehumanizing language of eliminationist ideologies, especially animalistic, mechanistic, medical and demonic metaphors which enable the transgression of moral boundaries contesting the killing of a person (dehumanization of the enemy), and the justification of the committed acts of violence (self-dehumanization). It results in biases and inter-group hostility extending far beyond the battlefield. This raises the question of re-humanization (recognition of the human being in the former enemies), considered as an opportunity to get out of the vicious circle of aggression and repetitive violence. New phenomena, like barbarization of inter-state conflicts by denying them as a war (i.e. Russia’s war against Ukraine), will probably make the problem of savage wars even more important in the future.
