ABSTRACT
Modern changes have taken place in a context of wars, genocide, and the colonisation and exploitation of non-Western countries. Although some researchers consider war to be an obscured or covert aspect of modernity (Tiryakian, 1999), war in modern times is not an offspring of the pre-modern history of humankind, but an inseparable part of Western civilisation and modernities (Joas, 1999, 2003; Lawrence, 1999; Kamali, 2006, 2008). Modernity is often viewed as a new structural organisation of state, economy, society and culture. It is normally considered as a mode of consciousness, involving optimistic, future-oriented, and even peaceful, processes of change (Lawrence, 1999; Joas, 1999; Kamali, 2006). The philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Condorcet, Rousseau and Kant, had very optimistic ideas about the prospects and future of modernity as a peace-giving process based on the ‘innate goodness’ of humankind. According to them, the peaceful process of modernity would become even stronger because of increasing rationality in modern societies. Social scientists, such as the liberal economist Adam Smith, helped to reinforce modern optimism by considering economic growth as a result of industrialisation and a peaceful competition between producers; war was unnecessary when such peaceful competition would improve ‘the wealth of nations’, according to Smith.
